How Eliza Dushku Is Taking Back The Power After Her #MeToo Story

THIS IS AN UNUSUAL INTERVIEW. I AM NOT meeting Eliza Dushku in a Beverly Hills restaurant or a SoHo hotel bar, where celebrity profiles are usually set.

- Eliana Dockterman

Instead, I find her in a coffee shop just off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. Inside, students in hoodies hunch over their laptops. Dushku has become one of these sweat shirt clad students: she’s studying holistic psychology, a therapeutic modality that integrates mind, body and spirit, at Lesley University. After nearly 30 years working in Hollywood, Dushku says she’s been getting a lot of calls from friends, a tinge of concern in their voices. “So, you’re in Boston?”

Yes, she is. Because Dushku has been thinking a lot lately about the narrative of her life, and she’s decided that learning more about how to heal others is her next step. That queasy feeling women who’ve experienced harassment get every time they hear a new #MeToo story—she wants to study that, because she’s experienced it. A lot.

Dushku has played plenty of tough women onscreen —a rebellious vampire slayer on Buffy, a foul-mouthed cheerleader in Bring It On and a savvy lawyer on the CBS show Bull—but offscreen, she’s been to hell and back. She says she was molested as a child actor on the set of True Lies. For years, she struggled with addiction. Most recently, she was fired from Bull after she complained that her co-star Michael Weatherly had sexually harassed her. And she had hard evidence: astonishingly, Weatherly made lewd comments while cameras were rolling. CBS paid her a $9.5 million settlement, a fraction of what she would have made had she been able to complete a proposed six-year contract.

“I have never been this nervous for an interview,” she says. “I’ve always been outspoken and honest. But I’m not used to being this vulnerable.”